Syracuse, N.Y. -- For reasons beyond my ability to grasp, there was a pack of barking dogs out there who ridiculed the whole Greg-Paulus-as-quarterback project unveiled this past fall by Doug Marrone, the first-year head coach of the Syracuse University football team.

Bad idea, they yipped . . . and mostly under the cloak of anonymity.

It didn’t matter that Paulus, the imported graduate student from Duke, completed two of every three passes he lofted (admittedly, few of which traveled any length of note). And it apparently didn’t count, either, that Paulus orchestrated more than 2,000 yards of offense with his tosses (although, certainly, the yards-after-catch numbers produced by the receivers were substantial).

No, the detractors did their detracting . . . again, for the most part, without the burden of self-identification. And they scalded a young man for having committed the sin of being the best quarterback on campus in the view of the guy who most mattered -- Marrone.

Well, those creatures once more have their rifles to their shoulders and they’re about to shout, “Pull!” because Paulus is back in the news and on the verge of again riling up the naysayers. This, because Greg has confessed to working out with the presumed hope of getting drafted in the spring by some NFL club that might be oddly inclined to take a flier on a quarterback prospect who will have played a total of 12 games at quarterback in a span of five years.

Me? I loved the Paulus experiment. I believe it bought needed time for Ryan Nassib and Charley Loeb (if, indeed, one or the other is next in line as the Orange quarterback). I believe it added some pizzazz to a program that had fallen somewhere between football dormancy and football irrelevancy. I believe it provided a template for current and future Syracuse athletes in the ways and means of conducting one’s self on and off the field, and inside and outside the locker room and classroom.

And, don’t forget, there were those tangibles -- that is, all those completions and all those yards, albeit sprinkled among all those early- and mid-season interceptions and fumbles.

But still, I wonder about this NFL business. And I wonder how serious either side -- Paulus or the pros -- can possibly be. Knocking around in college and squeezing out one last football fling is one thing; actually thinking that Greg’s arm and Greg's hands and Greg’s body translate to Sunday afternoons is something else altogether again.

Remember, Don McPherson, who should have won the Heisman Trophy in 1987 and just might have to be considered the second greatest quarterback in Syracuse history (after Donovan McNabb and, possibly, a smidge ahead of Marvin Graves), was told by the NFL not to bother, really, as a QB. And the reason was that his arm strength was supposedly not up to the task of throwing that critical sideline pass.

Well, if McPherson, a splendid athlete who played quarterback for five-out-of-five years before becoming eligible for the NFL (and led the Orange to a 16-2-1 record in his last 19 games as its starter) was pretty much dismissed by the pros, what chance does Paulus, who’s played one-out-of-five-years (and led SU to a 4-8 record in his time at the wheel) project to have?

Whatever, the fact of the matter is that nobody is going to get hurt here. Which suggests that there can’t be much harm in Greg’s trying. After all, he has done this tilting-at-windmills bit before, and Marrone ended up giving him the ball. So, why not? What is there to lose?

And so, we watch once more. And we'll do so as the rubberneckers we’ve become when the subject is Greg Paulus. And we’ll take our notes.

And, sure. Some, while traveling incognito along the internet’s boulevards, will choose again to yip and yip some more. But then, we should all be pretty used to those barking dogs. They've been all around us for a while now.

(Bud Poliquin’s freshly-written on-line commentaries, his column and his “To The Point” observations appear virtually every day on syracuse.com. Additionally, his work can be regularly found on the pages of The Post-Standard newspaper. E-mail: bpoliquin@syracuse.com.)